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10 Essential YouTube Tips and Tricks

1. Get Social With Connected Sharing Options
You can share YouTube content without hooking up your other social networking accounts, but if you do, the process gets all (buzzword alert!) “frictionless.”
As you upload, comment, favorite or like a video, these actions will be broadcast to your Facebook and Twitter accounts for your friends and followers to see.
To manage these options, click on your username at the top right of YouTube, then “Settings,” then “Sharing.”

Connected Accounts

2. Search in Different Languages
YouTube offers an on-screen keyboard for foreign languages.
This is useful as it means anyone can look for specific foreign language content from any PC — regardless of the physical keyboard’s layout.
To type search queries in Arabic, Greek, Russian, Thai (and more) you need to first change your language settings to your preferred lingo.
Scroll right down to the bottom of the screen and click on the language drop-down menu.
Once you’ve selected a language with special characters, a little keyboard icon will appear in the YouTube search bar. Click it to get started.

Different Languages

3. Change the Size and Resolution of Videos
In addition to the “full screen” option, YouTube now offers a viewing window that’s larger than the standard size, but does not fill the screen.
If clips aren’t good enough resolution to look decent at full screen, or if you need to keep an eye on other windows or programs, you can select the mid-size viewing option on the bottom right of the video window.
Resolution can be adjusted by hitting the resolution count (360p, 480p, etc) also on the bottom right.
In addition, you can change your account settings to always play HD when switching to full screen. To set this up, go to “Playback Setup” under the “Settings” menu.

Change the Size and Resolution of Videos

4. Save Videos to Watch Later
If you think your job might be at risk if your boss catches you watching one more kitty vid, you can save content to watch later.
You can find this option on the main YouTube site under the “Add to” icon just under the video window.
On embedded videos, the “Watch Later” button appears as a plus sign on the menu bar at the bottom.
To view your “Watch Later” list, select “Video Manager” from the menu that appears when you click on your username.

Save Videos to Watch Later

5. Manage Your History
Whether you want to find a video you recently watched or delete something you shouldn’t have, YouTube offers you “My Viewing History.”
You can find this under “Video Manager” once you click on your username icon at the top right of the screen.
From here, you can add them to your “Favorites,” your “Watch Later” list or your playlists, as well as delete videos you’ve watched.

Manage Your History

6. Speed Up With Keyboard Shortcuts
YouTube offers several useful keyboard shortcuts that are worth taking the time to get familiar with.
When you are watching a video, click on it and you can then use the spacebar as a pause/play button.
The left and right arrows work as rewind and fast forward shortcut keys, while the up and down arrows will control the volume.
Home and end are also handy shortcuts — home takes you back to the beginning of a video while end does the opposite.

Speed Up With Keyboard Shortcuts

7. “Leanback” and Enjoy
YouTube’s “Leanback” functionality was introduced to make it easier to browse content on connected TVs, but there’s no reason you can’t use it on your computer.
You can seamlessly browse your playlists as well as recommendations and featured videos. In addition, you can browse channels and enjoy instant search.
The best thing of all is Leanback’s chic, dark looks — it’s a much better looking way of browsing than the traditional site.

“Leanback” and Enjoy

8. Get Better at Search
YouTube’s search operators are fairly straightforward, but it’s good to remind yourself of the key terms to use.
In addition to the usual “quotations marks” to search for a specific term, plus or minus signs to include or omit results and the use of “INTITLE:term” to ensure the word you’re looking for appears in the video’s title, there are some YouTube-specific terms to note.
Adding “HD” to your search query will return high-def results while “3D” does the same for three-dimensional content.
Typing “today,” “this week” or “this month” helps you narrow down more recent content.
Adding “channels” or “playlists” to your search query returns such results.
Finally, “long” and “short” looks for videos over 20 minutes and less than four minutes.

Get Better at Search

9. Customize Your Captions
If you use YouTube captions, did you know you can customize them?
You can change the default font, foreground and background colors and make them larger or smaller.
To change your captions settings when viewing a video, click on the “CC” icon, then choose “Settings.”

Customize Your Captions

10. Have Fun With “YouTube Slam”
Finally, we’ve a fun one for you. “YouTube Slam” is a YouTube TestTube game that lets you rate similarly themed videos in a hot-or-not style.
To get started, scroll down to the bottom of any YouTube page, click “Try something new!” and then select “YouTube Slam.”
You can now play “Comedy Slam,” “Bizarre Slam,” or our favorite — “Cute Slam.” Enjoy!